Old Dalton had been built and outfitted to be a simple, colloquial home-maker, family-raiser, and husbandman. His annals were never intended to be anything more than plain and short. His was the function of the tree—to grow healthily and vigorously; to propagate; to give during his life, as the tree gives of its fruit and shade, such pleasant dole and hospitable emanation as he naturally might; and in the fullness of time to return again to the sod.
He had found and done thoroughly this appointed work of his. He was doing it still, or at least that part of it which, at the age of one hundred years, fittingly remained for him to do. He was tapering off, building the crown of his good stack. When Death, the great Nimrod, should come to Old Dalton, he would not find him ready caught in the trap of decrepitude. He would find him with his boots on, up and about—or, if in bed, not there except as in the regular rest intervals of his diurnal round.
And the fact that he, a polyp in the great atoll of life, had found his exact place and due work was the reason that, at one hundred years, life was yet an orange upon the palate of Old Dalton.
Nanny Craig—who later became Mother Dalton—had, in remote eighteen hundred and twenty, been a squalling, crabbed baby, and had apparently started life determined to be crotchety. If she had adhered to this schedule she would have been buried before she was sixty and would have been glad to go. But Old Dalton—then young Dave Dalton—married her out of hand at seventeen, and so remade and conserved her in the equable, serene, and work-filled atmosphere of the home he founded that Nanny far outdid all her family age records, recent or ancestral, and lived to ninety-three. She was seven years younger than Dave, and now three months dead.
Dave had missed her sorely. People had said the Message would not be long coming to him after she went. Perhaps if he had been in the usual case of those who have passed the seventh decade—weary and halt and without employment or the ability or wish for it—he would have brooded and worried himself into the grave very soon after the passing of his old "mate" and one living contemporary. But he was a born, inured, and inveterate worker, and as long as there were "chores" for him to do he felt ample excuse for continuing to exist. Old Dalton still had the obsession, too, that while and where he lived he was "boss" and manager; and one solid, sustaining thought that helped to keep him living was that if he died the Dalton farm (it was the original old homestead that these young descendants of his occupied) would be without its essential head and squire.
So sturdy, so busy, and so well had he been always that all the deaths he had seen in his journey down a hundred years of mortality had failed to bring home to him the grave and puissant image of death as a personal visitant.
"Ey, I'm always out wur-rkin' when they send fur me, I guess," was the joke he had made at eighty and repeated so often since that now he said it quite naively and seriously, as a fact and a credible explanation.
But, although it took time to show its effect, Nanny's going hit him a little harder than any of the other deaths he had witnessed. She had traveled with him so long and so doughtily that he had never been able to form any anticipative picture of himself without her. Indeed, even now it felt as if she had merely "gone off visitin'," and would be back in time to knit him a pair of mitts before the cold weather came.
It was the odd idea about the world growing "yellow-lookin'"—sometimes he said "red-lookin'" and at other times seemed not quite certain which description conveyed the vague hue of his fancy—that appeared to be pulling him to pieces, undermining him, more than any other influence. Most people, however, were accustomed to consider the hallucination an effect of Mother Dalton's removal and a presage of Old Dalton's own passing.
This odd yellowness (or redness), as of grass over which chaff from the threshing-mill has blown, lay across the old pasture on this afternoon of his second century, as Old Dalton went to water the superannuated black horse that whinnied at his approach.